Twenty five years of requests for euthanasia and physician assisted suicide in Dutch general practice: trend analysis

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Abstract
Concerns have been expressed that the Dutch policy on euthanasia (E) and physician assisted suicide (PAS) may lead to an exponential increase in the number of requests and use.1 Many Dutch general practitioners, nursing home physicians, and pharmacists have a fairly positive attitude and have become more tolerant over the years.2 We investigated the effect of increasing acceptance on the number of and underlying reasons for requests for E/PAS inDutch general practice from 1977 to 2001. The data were derived from the Dutch Sentinel Practice Network, which constitutes a sample of about 60 general practitioners, covers about 1% of the Dutch population, and is fairly representative of the total population (16 million) with regard to age, sex, geographical distribution, and level of urbanisation.3 Every year general practitioners reported data on requests for E/PAS from terminally ill patients, including age, sex, underlying disease, reasons for request, and presence of a living will. We estimated …